Francis Bacon — "The human understanding is unquiet; it cannot stop or rest, and still presses on…"
The human understanding is unquiet; it cannot stop or rest, and still presses onward, but in vain.
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More from Francis Bacon
"Money is like muck, not good except it be spread."
"Reading maketh a full man; conference a ready man; and writing an exact man."
"He that hath wife and children, hath given hostages to fortune."
"Men fear death as children fear to go in the dark."
"For the mind of man is far from the nature of a clear and unruffled mirror, but is rather like an enchanted glass, full of superstition and imposture, if it be not with judgment and industry regulated…"
About Francis Bacon (1561-1626)
English philosopher whose Novum Organum (1620) laid out the inductive method that became the foundation of modern empirical science. Closely associated with Galileo Galilei (contemporary scientific revolutionary). For an intellectual contrast, see Aristotelian scholasticism, the syllogistic, deductive philosophical tradition that ruled medieval universities — Bacon's Novum Organum literally means 'new instrument' — the explicit replacement for Aristotle's Organon. The entire scientific revolution turned on which logic was correct: deduction from authority or induction from observation.
The standard scholarly entry points to Francis Bacon's work: Lisa Jardine (Queen Mary University of London, Renaissance scholar) — Francis Bacon: Discovery and the Art of Discourse (1974); Jonathan Marwil (Michigan, intellectual historian) — The Trials of Counsel: Francis Bacon in 1621 (1976); Perez Zagorin (Rochester, historian of ideas) — Francis Bacon (1998). These are the works graduate seminars cite when teaching Francis Bacon.